Essays in Rebellion

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

"And, as I note how nobly natures form
Under the war's red rain, I deem it true
That He who made the earthquake and the storm
Perhaps makes battles too.
Thus as the heaven's many-coloured flames
At sunset are but dust in rich disguise,
The ascending earthquake-dust of battle frames
God's picture in the skies."[[19]]

We are no longer compelled to regard the dogmas of Christianity or the opinions of eminent Christians as authoritative. The appeal to Christianity, which used to be regarded as decisive in favour of peace, is no longer decisive one way or other. Christ's own teaching is submitted to critical examination like any other teacher's, and I should be the last to decry the representatives of the Prince of Peace for acclaiming the virtues of war, if they think their Master was mistaken. When bishops and deans and leading Nonconformists thirst for war's red rain, we must take account of their craving as part of man's nature. We must remember also that war has popular elements sometimes overlooked in its general horror. It is believed that in the American Civil War nearly a million men lost their lives; but against this loss we must set the peculiar longevity with which the survivors have been endowed, and the increasing number of heroes who enjoyed the State's reward for their services of fifty years before. Even during the South African War certain compensations were found. A charitable lady went on a visit of condolence to a poor woman whose husband's name had just appeared in the list of the killed at Spion Kop. "Ah, Mum," exclaimed the widow with feeling, "you don't know how many happy homes this war has made!"

Before we absolutely condemn war we must take account of these religious, medicinal, and domestic considerations. On the side of peace I think it is of little avail to plead the horrors and unreason of war. We all know how horrible and silly it is for two countries to pretend to settle a dispute by ordering large numbers of innocent men to kill each other. If horrors would stop it, anyone who has known war could a tale unfold surpassing all that the ghost of Hamlet's father had seen in hell. There are sights on a battlefield under shell-fire, and in a country devastated by troops, so horrible that even war correspondents have silently agreed to leave them undescribed. But the truth is that people who are not present in war enjoy the horror. That is what they like reading about in their back-gardens, clubs, and city offices. The more you talk of the horrors of war the more warlike they become, and I have met no one quite so bloodthirsty as the warrior of peace. Nor is it any good pleading for reason when about ninety-nine per cent. of every man's motives are not reasonable, but spring from passion, taste, or interest. The appeal even to expense falls flat in a country like ours, where about 200,000 horses, valued at £12,000,000, and maintained at a charge of £8,000,000 a year, are kept entirely for the pursuit of foxes, which are preserved alive at great cost in order that they may be pursued to death.[[20]] Protests against the horrors, the unreason, and even the expense of war have hitherto had very small effect.

The real argument in favour of war welcomes horror, defies reason, and disregards expense. There are certain military qualities and aspects of life, it says, that are worth preserving at the cost of all the horror, unreason, and waste of war. The stern military character, brave but tender, is a type of human nature for which we cannot pay too much. Consider physical courage alone, how valuable it is, and how rare. With what speed the citizen runs at the first glimpse of danger! With what pleasure or shamefaced cowardice citizens look on while women are being violently and indecently assaulted when attempting to vindicate their political rights! How gladly everyone shouts with the largest crowd! Consider how many noble actions men leave undone through fear of being hurt or killed. "Dogs! would you live for ever?" cried Frederick the Great to his soldiers, in defeat; and most of us would certainly answer: "Yes, we would, if you please!" Only through war, or the training for war, says the argument, can this loathly cowardice be kept in check. Only by war can the spirit be maintained that redeems the world from sinking into a Pigs' Paradise. Only in the expectation or reality of war can life be kept sweet, strong, and at its height. War is life in extremes; it is worth preserving even for its discipline and training.

"Manhood training [said Mr. Garvin, editor of the Observer,
in the issue of January 22, 1911]—manhood training has become the basis of public life, not only in every great European
State, but in young democratic countries, like Australia and
South Africa. 'One vote, one rifle,' says ex-President Steyn.... As
a means of developing the physical efficiency of whole
nations, of increasing their patriotic cohesion, of implanting in
individuals the sense of political reality and responsibility, no
substitute for manhood training has yet been discovered."

This kind of argument implies despair of perpetual, or even of long-continued, peace. It is true that those who advocate a national training of all our manhood for war generally urge upon us that it is the best security for peace. In the same way, peaceful Anarchists might plead that they maintained several enormous bomb-factories in order to impress upon rulers the advantages of freedom. But if peace were the real and only object of Conscription, and if Conscription precluded the probability of war, military training, after some years, would almost certainly decline, and its supposed advantages would be lost. When you breed game-cocks, they will fight; but if you forbid cock-fighting, the breed will decline. You cannot have training for war without the expectation of war. For many years I was a strong advocate of national service, even though I knew it would never be adopted in this country until we had seen the realities of war in our very midst, and had sat in morning trains to the City stopped by the enemy's batteries outside Liverpool Street and London Bridge. I also foresaw the extreme difficulty of enforcing military training upon Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Peace Society, and many Nonconformists and Rationalists. Nevertheless, twenty-five years ago I advocated Conscription in a carefully-reasoned article that appeared in Mr. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette. It was received with a howl of rage and derision by both parties in the State, and by all newspapers that noticed it at all. It is significant—perhaps terribly significant—that it would not be received with derision now, but that nearly the whole of one party and the great majority of newspapers would welcome it only too gladly.

It seemed to me at that time—and it seems to me still—one of the most horrible things in modern British life that we bribe the unemployed, that we compel them by fear of starvation, to do our killing and dying for us. I have passed more men into the army, probably, than any recruiting sergeant, and I have never known a man who wished to recruit unless he was unemployed. The Recruiting Report issued by the War Office for 1911 shows ninety per cent. of the recruits "out of work." I should have put the percentage still higher. But when you next see a full company of a hundred soldiers, and reflect that ninety of them have been persuaded to kill and die for you simply through fear of starvation under our country's social system—I say, whether you seek peace or admire war, the thought is horrible; it is hardly to be endured.

To wipe out this hideous shame, to put ourselves all in one boat, and, if war is licensed murder, at all events to share the murder that we license, and not to starve the poor into criminals for our own relief, perhaps Conscription would not be too high a price to pay. Other advantages are more obvious—the physical advantage of two years' regular food and healthy air and exercise for rich and poor alike, the social advantage of the mixture of all classes in the ranks, the moral advantage of giving the effeminate sons of luxury a stern and bitter time. For all this we would willingly pay a very heavy price. I would pay almost any price.

But should we pay the price of compulsion? That is the only price that makes me hesitate. I used to cherish a frail belief in discipline and obedience to authority and the State. My belief in discipline is still alive—discipline in the sense of entire mutual confidence between comrades fighting for the same cause; but I have come to regard obedience to external authority as one of the most dangerous virtues. I doubt if any possible advantage could balance an increase of that danger; and every form of military life is almost certain to increase it. To me the chief peril of our time is the growing power of the State, its growing interference in personal opinion and personal life, the intrusion of an inhuman being called an expert or official into the most intimate, inexplicable, and changing affairs of our lives and souls, and the arrogant social legislation of a secret and self-appointed Cabal or Cabinet, which refuses even to consult the wishes of that half of the population which social restrictions touch most nearly. If general military service would tend to increase respect and obedience to external authority of this kind, it might be too big a price to pay for all its other advantages. And I do think it would tend to increase that abhorrent virtue of indiscriminate obedience. Put a man in uniform, and ten to one he will shoot his mother, if you order him. Yet the shame of our present enlistment by hunger is so overwhelming that I confess I still hesitate between the two systems, if we must assume that the continuance of war is inevitable, or to be desired.

Is it inevitable? Is it to be desired? If it were dying out in the world, should we make efforts to preserve war artificially, as we preserve sport, which would die out unless we maintained it at great expense? The sportsman is an amateur butcher—a butcher for love. Ought we to maintain soldiers for love—for fear of losing the advantages of war? Those advantages are thought considerable. War has inspired much art and much literature. It is the background or foreground in nearly all history; it sheds a gleam of uniforms and romance upon a drab world; it delivers us from the horrors of peace—the softness, the monotony, the sensual corruption, the enfeebling relaxation. No one desires a population slack of nerve, soft of body, cruel through fear of pain, and incapable of endurance or high endeavour.